1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to distributed computing, and in particular, to a method, system, apparatus, and article of manufacture for managing a workload in a distributed computing environment based on a set of business rules.
2. Description of the Related Art
Distributed computing over fixed and elastic resource pools (compute machine image execution environments) can be configured to scale and balance load (system resource stress) by launching new virtual machines (instances) and can similarly decrease the number of these instances to reduce operational cost. Further, these processes can be programatically driven, that is, based on static or even dynamic heuristics, and leveraging interfaces that report system and application data. In other words, high performance compute grids/clusters with the automatic provisional of computes and load balancing/work distribution has been available in the prior art.
Prior art systems may also provide platforms upon which product groups can build scalable compute-intensive services and other offerings. Such a platform may provide the mechanism for managing requests for work, distributing them to compute instances and coordinating the scaling, balancing, provisioning and integrity management of the instances as well.
However, the prior art distributed computing systems provide for balancing the workload based on the resources of the machines within the distributed system. Thus, the processing is shifted solely based on resource use. Further, the mechanism for determining how processing is distributed cannot be dynamically changed during execution.
In view of the above, what is needed is the ability to influence the processing based on factors other than resources (e.g., a set of business rules) while maintaining the ability to dynamically change the nature of the execution of the application itself.